Every age has
its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago, we used to accept Marx
and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the
tartan, why life was so confusing. Today there is similar trouble
over the question whether there is, or is not, something called
Human Nature. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of
animal behavior studies, and comparisons between animals and men
have become immensely popular. People use evidence from animals to
decide whether man is naturally aggressive, or naturally
territorial; even whether he has an Aggressive or Territorial
Instinct. On the other hand, many sociologists and psychologists
still seem to hold the Behaviorist view that man is a creature
entirely without instincts, and so do existentialist philosophers.
If so, all comparison with animals must be irrelevant. (To save
space, I have had to simplify both these party lines here, but if
anyone thinks I am oversimplifying the behaviorist one, I can only
ask him to keep on reading New Society.) On that view, man
is entirely the product of his culture. He starts off infinitely
plastic, and is formed completely by the society in which he grows
up. There is no end to the Possible variations between cultures;
what we take to be man's instincts are just the deep-dug
prejudices of our own society. If we form families, ear the dark,
or jump at the sight of a spider, these are just results of our
conditioning. For Existentialism, at first sight the scene is very
different, because the existentialist asserts man's freedom and
will not let him call himself the product of anything. But
Existentialism too denies hat man has a nature; if he had his
freedom would not be complete. So Sartre insists that "there is no
human nature. . . . Man first of all exists, encounters himself,
surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards. If man as
the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to
begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and
then he will be what he makes himself."[1]

For
Existentialism there is only the Human Condition, which is what
happens to man and not what he is born like. If we are afraid of
the dark, it is because we choose to be cowards; if we care more
for our own children than other people's it is because we choose
to be partial. We must never talk about human nature or human
instincts.

In this paper
I want, first, simply to draw attention to this dialectic, which
can certainly do with intelligent attention from all sides.
Second, I want, myself, to work from the animal behavior angle,
which I think is extremely interesting and has not yet been fully
used by philosophers. One reason for this is undoubtedly the fear
of fatalism; another is the appalling misuse of terms like
"instinct" and "human nature" in the past; the third is the
dottiness of some ethological propaganda. To dispose of the last
first; if we vetoed every science that has had some lunatic
exponents we could quickly empty the libraries. What is needed in
such cases is to sort the wheat from the chaff. To quote Konrad
Lorenz:[2]

... if I have
to confess to a sneaking liking for, and even a feeling of
gratitude to, my adversaries, I think it only fair to confess that
some of my allies make me squirm. Desmond Morris, who is an
excellent ethol-ogist and knows better, makes me wince by
over-emphasizing, in his book The Naked Ape, the
beastliness of man. I admit that he does so with the commendable
intention of shocking haughty people who refuse to see that man
has anything in common with animals at all, but in this attempt he
minimizes the unique properties and faculties of man in an
effectively misleading manner; the outstanding and biologically
relevant property of the human species is neither its partial
hairlessness nor its "sexiness," but its faculty for conceptual
thought—a fact of which Desmond Morris is, of course, perfectly
aware. Another writer who makes me suffer with almost equal
intensity, if for different reasons, is Robert Ardrey. . . .

To that mass
of knowledge, Lorenz himself adds a clear view of the conceptual
scene typical, it must be said, of scientists who have had the
foresight to get themselves educated on the continent and not in
England or America. (This is also true of Tinbergen and
Eibl-Eibesfeldt and of that splendid old person Wolfgang Kohler.[3])
Because of this, and for simplicity, I shall address myself
largely to his arguments, and particularly to his book On
Aggression, without suggesting that he is either isolated or
infallible. Like him, however, I have a difficulty of method. The
point of my argument is to show how and in what cases comparison
between man and other species makes sense, but I must sometimes
use such comparisons in the process. Those to whom it is a matter
of faith and morals not to consider them, have a problem. I think
the circle will prove virtuous, but in advance I suggest the
following test. Comparisons make sense only when they are put in
the context of the entire character of the species concerned and
of the known principles governing resemblances between species.
Thus: it is invalid to compare suicide in lemmings or infanticide
in hamsters on their own with human suicide or infanticide.
But when you have looked at the relation of the act to other
relevant habits and needs, when you have considered the whole
nature of the species, comparison may be possible and helpful.

Now for the
other objections.

1. About the
fear of fatalism I shall not say much, because it seems to me
quite misplaced here. The genetic causes of human behavior need
not be seen as overwhelming any more than the social causes;
either lot is alarming if you treat it as predestined to win, but
no one is committed to doing that by admitting that both lots
exist. Knowing that I have a naturally bad temper does not make me
lose it; on the contrary it should help me to keep it, by forcing
me to distinguish my peevishness from moral indignation. My
freedom, therefore, does not seem to be particularly threatened by
the admission, nor by any light cast on the meaning of my bad
temper by comparison with animals.

2. Words
like "instinct" are another matter. Ethologists, particularly
Lorenz and Tinbergen, have put in a lot of work on these terms,
and I think they are now fit for use again. They are used, not
wildly but in a definite and well-organized way, in the detailed,
systematic, gruelling studies of animal behavior which have been
made by trained zoologists in this century, and have been given
the name of Ethology. I shall discuss the use of the terms later.

The general
point is that animals clearly lead a much more structured, less
chaotic life than people have been accustomed to think, and are
therefore, in certain quite definite ways, much less different
from men. (There is still plenty of difference, but it is a
different difference.) Traditionally, people have congratulated
themselves on being an island of order in a sea of chaos. Lorenz
and company have shown that this is all my eye and Bishop
Wilberforce. There follow various changes in our view of man,
because that view has been built up on a supposed contrast between
man and animals which was formed by seeing animals, not as they
were, but as projections of our own fears and desires. We have
thought of a wolf always as he appears to the shepherd at the
moment of seizing a lamb from the fold. But this is like judging
the shepherd by the impression he makes on the lamb, at the moment
when he finally decides to turn it into mutton. Lately,
ethologists have taken the trouble to watch wolves systematically,
between meal-times, and have found them to be, by human standards,
paragons of regularity and virtue. They pair for life, they are
faithful and affectionate spouses and parents, they show great
loyality to their pack, great courage and persistence in the face
of difficulties, they carefully respect each other's territories,
keep their dens clean, and extremely seldom kill anything that
they do not need for dinner. If they fight with another wolf, the
fight ends with his submission; there is normally a complete
inhibition on killing the suppliant and on attacking females and
cubs. They have also, like all social animals, a fairly elaborate
etiquette, including subtly varied ceremonies of greeting and
reassurance, by which friendship is strengthened, co-operation
achieved and the wheels of social life generally oiled. All this
is not the romantic impressions of casual travellers; it rests on
long and careful investigations by trained zoologists, backed up
by miles of film, graphs, maps, population surveys, droppings
analysis and all the rest of the contemporary toolbag. Moreover,
these surveys have often been undertaken by authorities which were
initially rather hostile to the wolf, and inclined to hope that it
could be blamed for their various troubles. Farley Mowat, doing
this work in the Canadian Arctic, had his results rejected time
and again because they showed that the sudden drop in the numbers
of deer was not due to wolves, who had not changed their
technique in a number of centuries, but to hunters, who had.[4]

Actual
wolves, then, are not much like the folk-figure of the wolf, and
the same goes for apes and other creatures. But it is the
folk-figure that has been popular with philosophers. They have
usually taken over the popular notion of lawless cruelty which
underlies such terms as "brutal," "bestial," "beastly," "animal
desires," etc., and have used it, uncriticized, as a contrast to
illuminate the nature of man. Man has been mapped by reference to
a landmark which is largely mythical. Because this habit is so
ancient, and so deep-rooted, I shall say a little more about it
before turning to the philosophic arguments in question.
Consideration of its oddity may perhaps prevent us dismissing the
whole topic in advance. The fact that some people are silly about
animals cannot stop the topic being a serious one. Animals are not
just one of the things with which people amuse themselves, like
chewing-gum and water-skis, they are the group to which people
belong. We are not just rather like animals; we are
animals. Our difference from our relatives may be striking, but
the comparison has always been, and must be, crucial to our view
of ourselves. It will matter if, as I believe, the gap comes in a
slightly different place from where tradition puts it, as well as
being rather narrower. The traditional view has certainly
distorted argument in ethics, and may have caused mistakes about
the possibilities open to humanity.

Turning back
then to wolves: the contrast of the ethologist's fully documented
picture with the traditional view of the wolf needs no comment. I
have read a chatty journalistic book on wolves, whose author
described in detail how wolves trapped in medieval France used to
be flayed alive, with various appalling refinements. "Perhaps this
was rather cruel," he remarked, "but then the wolf is itself a
cruel beast." The words sound so natural; it is quite difficult to
ask oneself; do wolves in fact flay people alive? Or to take in
the fact the only animal that shows the slightest interest in
doing this sort of thing is homo sapiens. Another complaint
that the author made against wolves was their Treachery. They
would creep up on people secretly, and then they would attack so
suddenly that their victims did not have time to defend
themselves. The idea that wolves would starve if they always gave
fair warning never strikes him. Wolves, in fact, have
traditionally been blamed for being carnivores, which is
doubly surprising since the people who blamed them normally ate
meat themselves, and were not, as the wolf is, compelled by their
stomachs to do so.

The restraint
apparent in wolves seems to be found in most other carnivores, and
well-armed vegetarian creatures too. Where murder is so easy, a
species must have a rigorous inhibition against it or
perish. (Of course this inhibition is not a morality, but
it works in many ways like one.) Animals less strongly armed do
not need this defence. Lorenz[5]5
gives chilling examples from Roedeer and Doves, in both of
which species stronger members will slowly murder any weaker one
if they are kept in captivity with it, because these creatures in
a free state save themselves by running away, and not by relying
on the inhibition of the victor. And it is painfully clear that
Man is nearer to this group than to the wolf.

Man, before
his tool-using days, was pretty poorly armed. Without beak or
horns, he must have found murder a tedious and exhausting
business, and built-in inhibitions against it were therefore not
necessary for survival. Then, by the time he invented weapons, it
was too late to alter his nature. He had already become a
dangerous beast. War and vengeance are primitive human
institutions, not late perversions; most cosmogonies postulate
strife in Heaven, and bloodshed is taken for granted as much in
the Book of Judges as in the Iliad or the Sagas. There may
be non-aggressive societies, as anthropologists assure us, but
they are white blackbirds and possibly (as I shall argue later)
not so white as they are painted. It seems likely that man shows
more savagery to his own kind than any other mammal, though
among the beasts Lorenz mentions, rats are certainly a competitor.
They, it seems, will normally try to kill any rat they meet of
another tribe, but in compensation they never kill or seriously
fight rats of their own tribe. Rats cannot therefore compete with
Cain, or Romulus, still less with Abimelech the son of Gideon, who
murdered, on one stone, all his brothers, to the number of
three-score and ten.[6]
An animal who does this is surely rightly labelled "dangerous."

Yet he has
always believed otherwise. Man, civilized Western man, has always
maintained that in a bloodthirsty world he alone was comparatively
harmless. Consider the view of the African jungle given by
Victorian hunters. The hunter assumed that every creature he met
would attack him, and accordingly shot it at sight. Of course he
didn't want to eat it, but he could always stuff it (in order to
triumph over his human enemies) and anyway he assumed it was
noxious; it would be described in his memoirs as "the great
brute." Drawings even exist of Giant Pandas cast in this totally
unconvincing role—and shot accordingly. Yet in these days game
wardens and photographers habitually treat lions as familiarly as
big dogs. It is understood that so long as they are well fed and
not provoked they are no more likely to attack you than the
average Alsatian. Much the same seems to hold to elephants and
other big game. These creatures have their own occupations, and,
unless seriously disturbed, are not anxious for a row. Gorillas in
particular are peace-loving beasts; Schaller[7]
visited a tribe of them for six months without receiving so much
as a cross word, or seeing any quarrelling worth naming. In this
case, and no doubt in others, Victorian man was deceived by
confusing threatening behaviour with attack. Gorillas do threaten,
but the point is precisely to avoid combat. By looking
sufficiently dreadful, a gorilla patriarch can drive off intruders
and defend his family without the trouble and danger of actually
fighting. The same thing seems to hold of other simians, and
particularly of Howler Monkeys, whose dreadful wailing used to
freeze that white hunter's blood. For howlers have reduced the
combat business to its lowest and most satisfactory terms. When
two groups of them compete for a territory, they both sit down and
howl their loudest, and the side which makes the most noise has
won. That nervous White Man, with his heart in his mouth and his
finger on his trigger, was among the most dangerous things in the
jungle. His weapon was at least as powerful as those of the
biggest animals, and while they attacked only what they could eat,
or what was really annoying them, he would shoot at anything big
enough to aim at. Why did he think they were more savage than he?
Why has civilized Western man always thought so? I am not
surprised that early man disliked wolves. When an animal
tries to eat you, you cannot be expected to like it, and only a
very occasional Buddhist will co-operate. But why did he feel so
morally superior? Could he not see that the wolf's hunting him was
exactly the same as his hunting the deer? (There are tribes which
do think in this way: but it is Western thought that I am
exploring.) As Lorenz remarks, people are inclined to disapprove
of carnivores even when they eat other animals and not people, as
though other animals all formed one species, and the carnivores
were cannibals. "The average man," he says, "does not judge the
fox that kills a hare by the same standard as the hunter who
shoots one for exactly the same reason, but with the severe
censure that he would apply to a game-keeper who made a practice
of shooting farmers and frying them for supper." This disapproval
is very marked on the occasions when foxes do kill for sport or
practice, destroying more hens than they can eat. You would not
guess, to hear people talk at such times, that people ever hunted
foxes. In the same way, it makes a very disreputable impression
when Jane Goodall[8]
reports that the chimpanzees she watched would occasionally catch
and eat a baby baboon or colobus monkey, though they all lived
amicably together most of the time and the children even played
together. But what else goes on on the traditional farm?

Sing, Dilly
dilly duckling, come and be killed,

For you must
be stuffed, and my customers filled.

The reason
why such parallels are hard to see is, I suggest, that man has
always been unwilling to admit his own ferocity, and has tried
to deflect attention from it by making animals out more ferocious
than they are. Sometimes the animals themselves have been blamed
and punished. Such customs as the flaying of wolves were probably
intended as punishments, though it might be hard to separate this
intention from magic. And certainly the Wickedness of animals has
often been used to justify our killing or otherwise interfering
with them. It is a cock-eyed sort of Justification, unless Beasts
were supposed capable of Deliberation. We Would probably do better
to invoke our natural loyalty to our own species than to rely on
our abstract superiority to others. But I am more interested for
the moment in the philosophic use of the Beast Within than in our
treatment of Beasts Without.

The
philosopher's Beast Within is a lawless monster to whom nothing is
forbidden. It is so described both by moralists like Plato, who
are against it, and by ones like Nietzsche, who are for it. Here
is a typical passage from Book IX of the Republic, where
Plato[9]
is talking about our nastier desires. These

. . . bestir
themselves in dreams, when the gentler part of the soul slumbers,
and the control of Reason is withdrawn. Then the Wild Beast in us,
full-fed with meat and drink, becomes rampant and shakes off sleep
to go in quest of what will gratify its own instincts. As you
know, it will cast off all shame and prudence at such moments and
stick at nothing. In phantasy it will not shrink from intercourse
with a mother or anyone else, man, god or brute, or from forbidden
food or any deed of blood. It will go to any lengths of
shamelessness and folly.

Consider how
odd the image is, in spite of its familiarity. Why not say, have
these thoughts in my off moments"? Why not at least the Other Man
within? What is gained by talking about the Beast?

Here is
Nietzsche,[10]
speaking of the Lion whom he invokes to break the chain of
convention:

To create for
himself freedom for new creation—for this the Lion's strength is
sufficient,

To create for
himself freedom, and a holy Nay even to duty; therefore, my
brethren, is there need of the Lion.

Once it loved
as holiest Thou Shalt—Now it must see illusion and tyranny even in
its holiest, that it may snatch freedom even from its love—

For this
there is need of the Lion. . . .

But in the
world there is no such beast. To talk of a Beast is to talk of a
thing with its own laws. If lions really did not draw the line at
anything—if they went about mating with crocodiles, ignoring
territory, eating poisonous snakes and killing their own cubs—they
would not be lions, nor, as a species, would they last
long. This abstract Beast is a fancy on the level of the
eighteenth century's abstract Savage, whether Noble or otherwise.
(Dr. Johnson: Fanciful people may talk of a mythology being
amongst them, but it must be invention. . . . And what account of
their religion can you suppose to be learnt from savages?[11])
What anthropology did for this myth, ethology now does for the
Beast myth. Kipling's Law of the Jungle is nearer to reality than
this fancy of the moralists. What is particularly odd is that
beasts are supposed to be so given to sexual licence. It really
should not have needed Desmond Morris to point out that, among
animal species, homo sapiens gives an exceptional amount of
time and attention to his sexual life. For most species, a brief
mating season and a simple instinctive pattern make of it a
seasonal disturbance with a definite routine, comparable to
Christmas shopping; it is exactly in human life that it plays, for
good or ill, a much more serious and central part. With no other
species could a Freudian theory ever have got off the ground.
Gorillas, in particular, take so little interest in sex that they
really shock Robert Ardrey:[12]
he concludes that they are in their decadence. Yet Tolstoy,[13]
speaking of the life of systematic sexual indulgence, called it
"the ideal of monkeys or Parisians."

If then there
is no Lawless Beast outside man, it seems very strange to conclude
that there is one inside him. It would be more natural to say, the
beast within us gives us partial order; the business of conceptual
thought will only be to complete it. But the opposite, a priori
reasoning was the one that prevailed. If the Beast Within was
capable of every iniquity, people reasoned, then Beasts Without
probably were so too. This notion made man anxious to exaggerate
his difference from all other species, and to ground all
activities he valued in capacities unshared by the animals,
whether the evidence warranted it or no. In a way this evasion
does the species credit, because it reflects our horror at the
things we do. Man fears his own guilt, and insists on fixing it on
something evidently alien and external. Beasts Within solve the
Problem of Evil. It does him credit, because it shows the power of
his conscience, but all the same it is a dangerous fib. It is my
contention that this use of the Beast Within as a scapegoat for
human wickedness has led to some bad confusion, not only about
Beasts (which might not matter) but about Man. I suspect that Man
began to muddle himself quite badly at the point where he said
"The Woman beguiled me, and I did eat," and the Woman said the
same about the Serpent. . . .

Aristotle,
though in general he was much more convinced of man's continuity
with the physical world than Plato, makes some equally odd uses of
the contrast between man and beast. In the Nicomachean ethics[14]he asks what the true function of man is, in order to see what
his happiness consists in, and concludes that that function is the
life of reason because that life only is peculiar to man. I
do not quarrel for the moment with the conclusion but with the
argument. If peculiarity to man is the point, why should one not
say that the function of man is technology, or the sexual
goings-on noted by Desmond Morris, or even being exceptionally
ruthless to one's own species? For in all these respects man seems
to be unique. It must be shown separately that this
differentia is itself the best human quality, that it is the point
where humanity is excellent as well as exceptional. And it is
surely possible a priori that the point on which humanity
is excellent is one in which it is not wholly unique—that
at least some aspect of it might be shared with another race of
beings? Animals are, I think, used in this argument to point up by
contrast the value of reason, to give examples of irrational
conduct whose badness will seem obvious to us. But unless we start
with a particular view about the importance of Reason in conduct,
we shall not necessarily agree. If we prefer, among humans, an
impulsively generous act to a cold-blooded piece of calculation,
we shall not be moved from our preference by the thought that the
generous act is more like an animal's. Nor ought we to be. The
claims of Reason must be made good, if at all, within the
boundaries of human life itself. They could be strengthened by
race-prejudice only if it were true, as sometimes seems to be
suggested, that animals were, in fact, invariably wicked. . . .

I have been
suggesting that animal life is much more orderly, and ordered in a
way closer to human patterns, than tradition suggests. People may
grant this, and still ask what it means to attribute this order to
Instinct. This must of course be gone into before the term can
sensibly be applied to people.

A very useful
piece of terminology here is that of Closed and Open Instincts.
Closed instincts are behavior patterns fixed genetically in every
detail, like the bees' honey-dance, some bird-song, and the
nest-building pattern of weaver-birds. Here the same complicated
pattern, correct in every detail, will be produced by creatures
which have been carefully reared in isolation from any member of
their own species, and from any helpful conditioning. Genetic
programming here takes the place of intelligence; learning is just
maturation. Open instincts on the other hand are general
tendencies to certain kinds of behavior, such as hunting,
tree-climbing, washing, singing or the care of the young. Cats,
for example, tend naturally to hunt, they will do so even if
deprived of all example. They do it as kittens when they do not
need food, and they will go on doing it even if they are kept
fully fed; it is not just a means to an end. But their hunting is
not a single stereotyped pattern, it covers a wide repertory of
movements; a cat will improve greatly in its choice of
these during its life, it can invent new ones and pick up tips
from other cats. In this sense hunting is learnt. The antithesis
between nature and nurture is quite false and unhelpful here;
hunting, like most activities of higher animals, is both innate
and learnt. The creature is born with certain powers and a
strong wish to use them, but it will need time, practice, and
(often) some example before it can develop them properly. Other
powers and wishes it does not have and will find it hard to
acquire. For instance, swimming is outside the usual range of both
cats and monkeys; in spite of their great agility it does not suit
them, as it suits men and hippopotami; example will not usually
bring them into the water, and they might starve if their food lay
beyond it.

Open
instincts of this kind are the main equipment of the higher
animals. It is to them that we must attribute all the complex
behavior which makes the wolf's social life so successful;
monogamy, cleanliness, cub care and inability to attack the
helpless are loose patterns, but they are built in. Open and
closed instincts however are clearly not distinct kinds of things;
they are the extremes of a scale with many grades between. For
instance, besides the birds with a fixed song pattern, there are
others with various powers of imitation. Mocking birds imitate
other birds' song and also non-bird noises; their programming is
obviously a more complicated matter than a cuckoo's, and must
include some power of selection. But imitating itself is an
instinct with them; they will do it untrained and you cannot teach
them to compose instead. Nest-building with the higher animals is
like this; they have no fixed stereotype, like the weaver-birds,
but a nest they will have, and if there is nothing to build it of
they will do the best they can without.[15]

Rats will
carry their own tails repeatedly into a corner, still showing the
same peculiar movements they would use if they had proper
materials. In this way, every gradation is found from the
stereotype to the quite general tendency. At the narrow end,
perhaps we can say that no instinct can ever be completely closed.
Even the weaver-bird must vary things a bit according to the
branch and his materials; even the dancing bee adapts to the state
of her digestion. At the wide end, what shall we say? Will the
notion of Open Instincts make sense when applied to people? Or
does it then become so wide as to be vacuous?

When
behaviorists say that man has no instincts, they always mean
closed instincts. They point to his failure to make standard webs
or do standard honey-dances, and ignore his persistent patterns of
motivation. Why do people form families? Why do they mind about
their homes and quarrel over boundaries? Why do they own property?
Why do they gamble, boast, show off, dress up and fear the
unknown? Why do they talk so much, and dance, and sing? Why do
children play, and for that matter adults too? Why is nobody
living in the Republic of Plato? According to Behaviorism, because
of cultural conditioning. So (Question 1) who started it? This is
like explaining gravitation by saying that whenever something
falls, something else pushed it; even if it were true, it wouldn't
help. Question 2; why do people ever resist their families?
Why do they do what everybody is culturally conditioning them
not to do? I have never seen a proper behaviorist answer to
that one, but I gather it would go in terms of subcultures and
cultural ambivalences, of society's need for a scapegoat and
suchlike. It is a pleasing picture; how do all the children of 18
months pass the news along the grapevine that now is the time to
join the subculture, to start climbing furniture, toddling out of
the house, playing with fire, breaking windows, taking things to
pieces, messing with mud and chasing the ducks? For these are
perfectly specific things which all healthy children can be
depended on to do, not only unconditioned but in the face of all
deterrents. Just so, Chomsky asks Skinner how it comes about that
small children introduce their own grammatical mistakes into
speech, talking in a way that they have never heard and that will
be noticed only to be corrected. In dealing with such questions,
the behaviorist's hands are tied by his a priori
assumption. The ethologist, on the other hand, proceeds
empirically, which is why I think we ought to like him. When he
finds some activity going on among the species he studies, he
doesn't look for reasons to regard it as something else, he simply
starts photographing and taking notes. He sees it done, and from
detailed observation of the context and comparison with other
activities he gradually moves towards explaining its relation with
other things which are done. (Thus; when herring gulls[16]meet at the borders of their territories they constantly
turn aside and pull grass. This is like nest-building behavior,
but the bird does not use the grass. Instead it follows other
patterns which commonly issue in fighting, and at times does
fight. Having thoroughly studied all the things it does, and
compared them with its conduct on other occasions, the ethologist
tries the hypothesis that this is Displaced Aggression—it is
working off its anger on the grass—but does not accept this
without careful comparison with other displacement activities and
a full analysis of the term and its physiological implications.)
He is not postulating any central cure-all explanation. This is
where he is better off than many previous people who have made use
of the term "human nature." This term is suspect because it
does suggest cure-all explanations, sweeping theories that man is
Basically Sexual, Basically Selfish or Acquisitive, Basically Evil
or Basically Good. These theories approach human conduct much as a
simple-minded person might approach rising damp. They look for a
single place where the water is coming in, a single source of
motivation. This hydraulic approach always leads to incredible
distortions once the theorist is off his home ground, as can be
seen if you look at Marxist theories of art or Freudian
explanations of politics. To trace the water back to its only
possible source means defying the laws of motion. The ethologist
on the other hand doesn't want to say that human nature is
basically anything; he wants to see what it consists of. (Even
Robert Ardrey doesn't say that man is basically
territorial.) So, if we must still talk hydraulics, he proceeds
more like a surveyor mapping a valley. He notes a spring here, a
spring there; he finds that some of them do tend to run together
(as, for instance, a cat uses tree-climbing for hunting and
caterwauling in courtship). If he finds an apparently isolated
activity, with no connexion with the creature's other habits, he
simply accumulates information until a connexion appears. Thus the
"suicide" of lemmings turns out to be, not an isolated monstrous
drive, but part of a very complicated migration pattern. (Lemmings
are good swimmers; they often do cross rivers or reach islands,
but the reason they set off is that they cannot stand being
overcrowded, a condition which drives them to all kinds of
desperate escape behaviour.[17])
Thus the grass-pulling gulls were not moved by an isolated
monstrous drive for Destruction, but by the interworking of two
patterns of motivation—fear and aggression which are connected in
certain definite ways in their lives in the context of nesting,
and can be roughly mapped to show the general character of the
species. Understanding a habit is seeing what company it keeps.
The meaning is the use. The only assumption made here is the
general biologist's one that there ought to be some system
in an organism, some point in any widespread plant or animal
habit. This is justified merely by its success. The Nature of a
Species, then, consists in a certain range of powers and
tendencies, a repertoire, inherited and forming a fairly firm
characteristic pattern, though conditions after birth will vary
the details quite a lot. In this way, baboons are "naturally
hierarchical animals," since they travel in bands with a leader
and what is pleasingly called a Senate of Elders, and show
carefully graded dominance behavior down to the meanest baby
baboon. This is not "disproved" by showing that it is not
necessarily a brutal "peck order," nor that the hierarchy vary a
great deal with different species and conditions.[18]
Investigating these subtleties merely strengthens and elucidates
the idea of a natural hierarchical tendency. Nor is it disproved
by finding an occasional baboon who is disrespectful or lax about
his dignity; baboons "naturally" have fur, and finding a few going
bald will not disprove it. ...

I had better
end by saying that I do not of course expect all the facts
relevant to the nature of man to be turned up by ethologists.
Other disciplines, equally relevant to moral philosophy, have
suffered under rather similar tabus. Of course they should not be
thought to take over the subject, but all are relevant; we
certainly need history, neurology and all the social sciences. If
we want to know what is good for man we must know what are his
possibilities and roughly what is the price to be paid for each
option. But among these studies, perhaps the resistance to
ethology has been particularly strong and irrational. As Lorenz
remarks, human pride had already taken two nasty knocks from
Darwin and Freud; there may be real difficulty in undergoing the
third and agreeing that homo sapiens is not just mildly
interested in animals; he IS an animal. . ..

[12]
Robert Ardrey, African Genesis, 126-127; Schaller,
The Year of the Gorilla.

[13]
L. Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, ch. ii. For further
comparison of human sexuality with that of other primate
species, see Wickler, "Socio-Sexual Signals," in |f- Morris,
Primate Ethology, 1967. Also, in spite of certain crass
and obvious errors, 'he Naked Ape. Eibl-Eibesfeldt in
Love and Hate sets the whole problem very well in
context.